Change Your Room with ‘Room Swap’

Starting July 1, Room Swap opens for first-year students

In May, UNC Housing announced the release of a new feature in the Housing Selection Process – Room Swap! With Room Swap, students can easily search for open spaces in every residence hall and apartment community available to them and make changes to their housing assignment on their own. And now, this feature will also be available to first-year students from July 1 – August 1!

So what does this mean and how do I swap?

This means that if you weren’t 100% happy with your assigned location, or you find someone different who you want to room with, you can go in and make the changes yourself. Swapping rooms is limited by room availability, of course, but now you have the ability to view what is available on your own.

Room Swap is located in Step #9 of your housing application, located at myhousing.unc.edu. Once you’re in the correct step, the Room Swap link should be located on the far right of the page.

Now that you’re in Room Swap, you’ll see the list of buildings available to you. Try clicking into each building, as some will have open rooms and other will not. Once you find the building you want, with rooms available in it, it’s time to pick the right room for you!

Building Selection

Since I’m a returning undergrad and not a first-year student, I decided to look for rooms in Cobb because the First Year Experience buildings are not open for me.

I see there are four spaces in double occupancy rooms on the 4th floor of Cobb, so I click on that floor, and it turns orange. Next, I click ‘Confirm’. And don’t worry, confirmation isn’t final until the very end!

Floor Selection

Once confirmed, you will be taken to a page that shows the floor plan of the level you selected (in this case the 4th) and a list of all the spaces available to you on that floor. Since I’m female, it will only show me spaces with female roommates.

If there’s a room where all the beds are open, it will show a D, meaning the gender of the room depends upon the gender who selects it first.

After the gender, there are numbers. In this example, all four available rooms show 1/2. This means that in each room, one of the two beds is available. If you see a room with 2/2, this means that there are two beds available, and you could move yourself and a roommate of your choice into that room.

Room Selection

When you’re looking at the rooms, you can click on the magnifying glass icon to learn a little bit about the current occupant. In this case, her name is Laura, and I can then click ‘View Profile’ to see what she has written about herself. If I think we’d be a good match as roommates, I’ll click ‘Confirm’ once again to move on to the next step.

Roommate Selection

The final step in swapping your room involves selecting your bed. This isn’t a huge deal because it’s not like you’ll arrive in your room and the beds will literally be labeled A and B. However, it is the way to finally confirm your room swap, so it’s important to ensure that this step is complete.

After clicking the room you want, you get a countdown from five minutes to select your bed and confirm your swap. If the countdown runs out, you risk losing the spot to someone else looking to swap rooms at the same time.

Bed Selection

If you don’t see something you want, you can keep checking back over the summer because inventory will be constantly changing as people cancel their housing contract or swap their rooms.

What option do I have besides the swap?

There is another option for living on campus that you may have missed when you first signed your housing contract – a Living-Learning Community! LLCs are a great opportunity to live with people who share common interests like service and sustainability.

You can switch into an LLC without any additional fees, even if you already have a housing assignment. LLCs do require a separate application, however, and the application is live right now at myhousing.unc.edu. You have until June 21st to apply, but spaces are filled on a rolling basis, so don’t wait too long!

Questions?

Feel free to ask us in a comment here, or on our Facebook page. You can even tweet us if you’d like!

If you need to call the main Housing office, you can reach us at (919) 962-5401 and housing@unc.edu. Please know that when assignments first go out, the volume of calls and emails to our office is quite high, and it may take us a while to get to your question, but we will do our best!

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18 thoughts on “Change Your Room with ‘Room Swap’”

My roommates and I were unaware that the rooms in Ram Village apartments had individual keys; I assume room swap was the way to change bed assignments within our apartment before check in, but is there any way we can change our assignments now?

Hi Ashley, please check your email for a detailed response, but for everyone else who is curious, Room Swap is currently closed, and room changes are on freeze from now until two weeks after classes begin. We will open Room Swap up again after September 3, after we have a chance to check everyone in and identify any cancellations/vacancies/no-shows.

My roommate and I (females) are thinking about switching into Hardin. We like the suite style, but because it is all girls, does that mean our guy friends/ boyfriends are never allowed to come over and visit us?

Hi everyone, Room Swap should be open as of 9 a.m. today. Please know that we’re pretty full right now, so there won’t be a ton of free spaces to move into right this minute. You can check back periodically throughout the month, as things are likely to shift and open up as the summer progresses. If you have any technical issues with the program, please call 919-962-5401 or email us at housing@unc.edu.

Megan, yes, you can use Room Swap to move as a roommate pair. But doing so may be tough because it requires that you find a room with two open spaces. At this stage in the year, we don’t have a lot of completely vacant rooms, most rooms already have one person assigned to them.